Writing History for the Stage: Raphael Lemkin and the Treaty Against Genocide

A Lecture by Robert Skloot

Abstract
The last quarter-century of Raphael Lemkin’s life was dedicated to one cause only: to finding a way through international law to define, prohibit and prevent the crime of genocide, a word he coined in 1944. Robert Skloot’s play If the Whole Body Dies (to be performed in Utrecht on January 17, 2017) presents with humor and sadness the story of Lemkin’s lonely life and extraordinary career. In this talk, Skloot will discuss how history is written for the theatre and what might be the task of theatre in an age of genocide.

Robert Skloot is professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author and editor of many books and essays about the theatre of the Holocaust and genocide, including The Darkness We Carry: The Drama of the Holocaust (1988) and the two-volume anthology The Theatre of the Holocaust (1981; 1999) and The Theatre of Genocide: Four Plays about Mass Murder in Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia and Armenia (2008). In 2011, Skloot was chosen for inclusion in Fifty Key Thinkers on the Holocaust and Genocide, ed. Bartrop and Jacobs (2011).

This event is co-organized by the Utrecht Forum for Memory Studies and The Perpetrator Studies Network and has been made possible through the generous support of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Utrecht University Research Focus Area Cultures, Citizenship and Human Rights (CCHR).